Spencer

Last week when I heard about the Jack Roush accident, it brought back memories of when I heard about Alan Kulwicki at Bristol. It's an awful feeling when you first hear about something like that.

Luckily, Jack had a guy there who helped him and saved his life. I like Jack Roush. He knows everybody in the garage area, and he's a tough competitor. I'm just glad he's going to make it.

I like Jack because he's built a heck of a situation over the years. A lot of people envy him. He's got over 2,000 employees and he's a guy that went from rags to riches solely on hard work. And I'll tell you -- his cars are hard to beat, no matter what level you're racing on.

I really like California. It's a lot like Michigan and Las Vegas. It's hard to get in trouble there because the corners are so wide. It's a fast track and it's fun to race there. It's a real smooth track, and you need to get your car handling right. You need a good aero package and horsepower package. It's a non-restricted race, and that's the most fun, when you're driving fast with non-restricted engines. We've struggled a little bit this year, but we've bounced back after not making the Daytona 500. We had an opportunity to win at Bristol and Martinsville and things didn't work out. I'm pretty happy where we are in the points right now, considering we missed a race.

I'm really looking forward to Richmond and Charlotte coming up. I'm really looking forward to all the tracks except maybe the road courses. And I'd say if everything goes right on the road course we could get a top-15 finish.

Friday afternoon we qualified the Target Dodge in 21st for Sunday's event. We just didn't pick up as much as we should have. I'm not sure what was wrong. We'd been qualifying in the top-10 at all of the non-restrictor plate tracks.

	Spencer has three top-10 finishes this season.

We could have made some adjustments, but we never got in a qualifying run in practice. Track position seems to be critical everywhere we go this year, whether it's Bristol or Las Vegas, it's critical everywhere.

Friday night, we went to the Yellow terminal for a meet and greet. I always look forward to visiting a Yellow terminal and talking to the employees. One of the first Yellow terminals I visited was in Chicago, and it was pretty cool. I went to the terminal in Dallas a few weeks ago, and that was fun, too.

Those guys and gals look forward to talking to you, and you can see they're really involved with it because they ask questions about this race or that race. They know what they're talking about. It's always a good time to be able to talk to those people, because if it wasn't for those guys working their butts off, we couldn't be doing what we're doing.

During the Busch race Saturday, we battled through the pack to the front and when I was in fifth with about 30 laps to go the engine let go. We had to settle for a 35th-place finish. It was very disappointing after fighting my way to the front to have to end like that.

We had a pretty disappointing day with the Target Dodge on Sunday, also. The car was real loose, and we couldn't get any grip in the corners. It got so bad that we had to come in early and adjust on the shocks. We lost a lap in the process and it really didn't help too much.

We ended up finishing 27th and we dropped one spot to 21st in the points. We're off to Richmond this weekend; hopefully we'll find better luck there.

Jimmy Spencer is the driver of the No. 41 Target Dodge Intrepid R/T. He will be providing a regular diary to ESPN.com throughout the Winston Cup season.